An archive of articles and listserve postings of interest, mostly posted without commentary, linked to commentary at the Education Notes Online blog. Note that I do not endorse the points of views of all articles, but post them for reference purposes.

Backed by $75 million in private financing, Whittle, 63, is responding to parents’ demand for spots for their children in the most selective private schools, he said in an interview on Jan. 27. Whittle aims to build a chain of more than 20 schools in cities worldwide, including London, Shanghai and Mumbai, he said.

Investors may be leery of the for-profit institution, called Avenues: The World School, after Senate hearings raised questions about the cost and quality of for-profit colleges, said Trace Urdan, an analyst with Signal Hill Capital Group in San Francisco. Avenues also lacks the cachet of New York’s top private schools, Amanda Uhry, a private-school consultant, said in a telephone interview.

“The New York parent who can afford this -- they want Fieldston, Horace Mann, Trinity,” said Uhry, founder of Manhattan Private School Advisors, listing three selective New York private schools. “They have 20 schools in their mind, and that’s it.”

‘All-Star’ Management

Avenues World Holdings LLC plans to open its first school in September 2012 in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood and will start taking application inquiries tomorrow. The school will charge about $36,000 a year, about the same as top-tier private institutions, and can compete with 200-year-old rivals because of its “all-star” management team, Whittle said.

Avenues’ co-heads are Tyler Tingley, who led Phillips Exeter in Exeter, New Hampshire, for 12 years, and Robert “Skip” Mattoon, who ran the Hotchkiss School in Lakeville, Connecticut, for 11 years. Gardner Dunnan, academic dean, led Dalton in New York for 23 years.

Benno Schmidt, the former president of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, will be chairman of Avenues. Schmidt co- founded New York-based Edison Schools Inc., the public schools operator, with Whittle in 1992.

The school wanted to “assemble a leadership group so parents just go ‘Wow!’” Whittle said.

Tingley, who retired from Exeter in 2009, wouldn’t disclose his pay at Avenues. At Exeter, in the year ended June 30, 2009, Tingley received $1.15 million in compensation, according to a tax filing. Of that sum, $354,000 was salary, and the rest was deferred compensation and benefits, Tingley said.

‘About the Excitement’

“They’re paying me well, as Exeter did, but this isn’t going to change my standard of living,” Tingley said. “It’s all about the excitement.”

To attract families that want their children to compete in a global economy, Avenues will require all students become fluent in a second language and take a “world course” that stresses non-Western history, geography and issues, according to the school’s marketing materials.

About 6 million students -- or about 11 percent of U.S. schoolchildren -- attend more than 33,000 private schools in the U.S., including parochial institutions, according to the U.S. Education Department. The average tuition is about $10,000. There are about 3,000 to 4,000 for-profit elementary and secondary schools in the U.S., said James Williams, executive director of the National Independent Private Schools Association, which represents for-profit schools.

Avenues has little in common with for-profit colleges, whose students depend on federal money for loans, Whittle said.

“We take not one dollar of government money,” Whittle said. “That has been the core debate area and we’re not involved with that.”

Avenues will contribute $4 million a year from its tuition revenue to financial aid, Whittle said.

Edison’s Contracts

Edison had public contracts to operate schools in cities such as Philadelphia, Detroit and San Francisco. In the 2002-2003 school year, Edison enrolled about 80,000 students in 149 schools in 22 states and the District of Columbia, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing.

Edison went public in 1999 at $18 a share and peaked at $36.75 in February 2001. A group of investors, including Whittle, took the company private in 2003, acquiring it for $1.76 a share. At the time, the company had run up more than $300 million in losses since its founding, according to an SEC filing. The company is now called EdisonLearning Inc.

Whittle’s failure to deliver on his promise -- of running public schools more efficiently while turning a profit -- raises questions about the credibility of his latest venture, Henry Levin, director of Columbia University’s National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education, in New York, said in a telephone interview.

Whittle’s Difficulties

Whittle “is a marketer par excellence,” said Levin, a professor at Columbia’s Teachers College. “He’s lost a lot of money for a lot of people. He’s got a track record on that.”

Edison had difficulties because it was a pioneer in a movement to overhaul public education through charter schools, Whittle said.

“It was tough, it was very hard,” Whittle said. “We had our ups and downs, as anybody in the charter movement did.”

New York City already has individual for-profit schools owned by their administrators, said Ronald Stewart, headmaster of Manhattan’s for-profit York Preparatory School, which he founded in 1969. London-based Word Class Learning Group oversees British Schools of America and is opening a school called World Class Learning Academy in Manhattan’s East Village in September.

Harlem Charter School's Merits Called into Question

Monday, January 31, 2011

Harlem Children's Zone representatives defend their program at a city council hearing(Beth Fertig)
A nationally celebrated Harlem non-profit whose founder was held up as a powerful education reformer in the documentary "Waiting for Superman" was called into question Monday during a City Council hearing on a study that questioned its effectiveness.

Harlem Children's Zone, which is run by Geoffrey Canada, did about the same as other Harlem charter schools in terms of academic achievement from 2007 to 2009, according to a study released by The Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institute last year. The City Council held a hearing Monday to discuss its effectiveness.
The Zone funds and operates what founder Canada calls a "pipeline" of social services for low-income families in about a 100-block area. It spends an average of $5,500 per child, thanks to generous funding from corporations (Canada is featured in American Express ads). It also runs two charter schools.
Given HCZ's prominence in New York and President Obama's call for similar "Promise Neighborhoods" around the country, Brooklyn City Councilman Al Vann said he wanted to hold a hearing over concerns raised in the Brookings study.
The federal government has already awarded planning grants to 21 groups that want to create programs similar to the Harlem Children's Zone. Two of them are in New York City: Lutheran Family Health Centers in Brooklyn, and Abyssinian Development Corporation in Harlem.
Three representatives of the HCZ attended the small hearing, held by Vann's Committee on Community Development, armed with a slideshow demonstrating their program's effectiveness.
The HCZ's Director of Education Research, Kate Shoemaker, told council members that the community programs have led to high rates of childhood immunization and prepared 99.5 percent of participating pre-schoolers for kindergarten. And she challenged the research showing schools are more effective at raising test scores than community programs, an area of national debate given the Obama administration's ambitious goals and limited available funds.

"There's no way, we believe, that supports alone, comprehensive supports alone, in the absence of a strong school will produce the results that we want," Shoemaker said. "In fact, that's why we began our own charter school a few years ago."
The HCZ's Chief Operating Officer, Geoffrey Canada, didn't attend the hearing. But he has taken issue with the Brookings report — stating that it didn't include a long-term look at his participants.
Vann said he wanted to hold the hearing because he worries some congressional representatives may not believe efforts to replicate the Harlem Children's Zone deserve to be fully-funded. President Obama has requested $210 million.
"What would you want us to say to them?" he asked Shoemaker and the two other HCZ representatives who attended the hearing.
"Communities and our children and families are facing multiple challenge and our work to date as a nation has been very siloed and our work to date has not been very coordinated and integrated," Shoemaker responded, adding that coordinated services stand a better chance of success. "That's what we believe it takes to break the cycle of poverty."
There was an awkward moment when Bronx councilwoman Helen Foster asked how many staffers at the Harlem Children's Zone come from its local community. Shoemaker told her 50 percent of her staff is locally hired.
"I'll be very honest," Foster responded to the all-white panel. "When I walked in and looked at the room I thought maybe I misunderstood because Harlem Children's Zone, I thought maybe there would be someone talking to me who looked like the kids and the families that we're saving. And that is still most shocking to me. Because right away I then have to put down my guard of the crunchy, earthy white liberal that's going to come save us from ourselves, and 'Look what we've done.'"
Foster went on, choosing her words carefully, to say "it would be very interesting to have heard from someone that is black or Latino that either has or has not come out of the cycle of poverty talking about a program that I think, an operation, that I think is very important and has results."

Wow, finally some good news at MY corrupt, failing charter school. 70% of the kids are not proficient in Math or ELA. Principal and assistant principal created two new positions as Deans and hired their unqualified men for the jobs. And that's just a small part of the corruption and cronyism...

Less than 3 days before the application deadline for high schools, the principal informed 8th grade parents that the school is revising it's charter and no longer going to high school! There's a whole lot more stuff at my school. We're the poster DoE charter with no oversight and an incompetent board.

We have no money. Our space agreement expires in June and there are no public hearings for our resiting. Oh, what a mess.

My school makes Ross Global and East NY Prep charters look good.

I communicate with my school for everything through my attorney. Let's hope the assistant principal is going to clean up the schools act by firing her live in boyfriend and starting fresh. Otherwise, she needs to go to.

I wonder if this is the result of SCI's investigation of my school...

Mona Davids

January 31, 2011

Dear Parents/Guardians of Equality Charter Students,

We would like to inform you that as of Friday, January 28, 2011, JoAnn Myers is no
longer Principal of Equality Charter School. Until at least the end of the
current 2010-2011 school year, Caitlin Franco will be Acting Principal.

We are unable to provide any further details with respect to the leadership
change, but we will provide all possible support to ensure a smooth and seamless
transition to the Equality staff so that they can continue to provide your
children with a high quality education.

Saturday, January 29, 2011

When she addressed Ackerman, she said that she and other teachers are under “pressure to increase numbers [test scores] in a way that isn’t necessarily meaningful - in a way that isn’t necessarily giving our kids better education.” She complained that teachers are “pressured to give make-up packets” of schoolwork so students can pass with Ds. But those Ds “don’t mean [the students] have [learned] those skills,” she said.Ackerman responded: “We are looking for people who say ‘I can teach a rock to read.’… If it is not the right place for you then you should find another place to go.”

Sounds like substandard credit recovery is spreading fast…

TFA teacher gets angry response from Ackerman

by Celeste Lavin

When the young teacher attending a panel discussion about men of color and education stood up to tell Superintendent Arlene Ackerman that the School District’s constant bureaucratic requirements impeded her ability to teach, she hardly expected what happened next.
Ackerman blew up at her and, in essence, told her to quit.
“What we need are teachers who don’t make excuses,” said Ackerman. “I don’t want to hear about bureaucracy. We have always had bureaucracies…. We are looking for people who say ‘I can teach a rock to read.’… If it is not the right place for you then you should find another place to go.”
The audience of about 400 people was stunned.
The event, at the University of Pennsylvania, was hosted by Teach for America and the Makuu Black Cultural Center at Penn. The purpose of the forum was to discuss ways to improve the educational experience of men of color and entice more into the teaching profession. Notebook blogger Samuel Reed also attended the event and is working on wrote a post about the forum's topic.
Approached later, the teacher said she was a Teach for America corps member in one of Ackerman’s Promise Academies. Understandably, she did not want to give her name.
“Did you see that? Did you see her tell me to quit?” she asked a friend after the panel discussion broke up, still incredulous. Other teachers encircled her in support.
When she addressed Ackerman, she said that she and other teachers are under “pressure to increase numbers [test scores] in a way that isn’t necessarily meaningful - in a way that isn’t necessarily giving our kids better education.” She complained that teachers are “pressured to give make-up packets” of schoolwork so students can pass with Ds. But those Ds “don’t mean [the students] have [learned] those skills,” she said.
“How are we supporting these teachers … to give a student a meaningful education when we have these barriers that really shouldn’t be barriers?” she said, citing the endless paperwork associated with referring students for the Comprehensive Student Assistance Program (CSAP) and filling out IEPs for special education students. She said that while these program are supposed to support students, teachers get little support in creating classroom environments that "give our students a really meaningful, powerful, impactful education that can lead to a real future and a real freedom.”
The audience, about a quarter of whom were young teachers themselves, offered the teacher the longest round of applause of the night.Then things got tense. Moderator Omari Todd – the vice president for regional operations for Teach for America – told the teacher that he’d pass the question to the panel but did not want to “lose the spirit of what we were hoping to do tonight.” At that, an audience member in a City Year uniform jumped up to interrupt.
“Excuse me, how could you not lose the spirit when there are three young Black African Americans sitting right here in front of you - since you said you were taking questions, you never called on any one of us.”
After an exchange with the City Year participant and his companions about programs for Black male students and outreach programs for men of color to enter the field of education, Ackerman responded to the young female teacher, who appeared to be of Asian descent.
The superintendent started by recalling how, when she was in school, one of her teachers had a sign on her door saying: “If my students do not learn the way I teach, then I will teach the way they learn.”
Then she told the teacher to stop making excuses.
The Notebook asked Ackerman's office if she wanted to comment further, but she did not reply.
We will update this post if we receive a response. Check back soon forHere's Reed's take on the topic of educating young men of color and bringing them into the teaching profession.

Why Bipartisanism Isn't Working for Education Reform

By Amy Stuart Wells

It’s not surprising that President Barack Obama focused heavily on both bipartisanism and education in his State of the Union address Tuesday night. Despite recent calls for civility following the shootings in Tucson, members of both parties in the divided 112th Congress have their gloves off on health care and immigration policy, with more contentious battles in the queue. Education reform, on the other hand, is one of the few policy areas in which we have seen growing political consensus. This has been good for the tenor of debate on Capitol Hill, but less so for the children in our public schools.

Since 1989, when President George H.W. Bush and the nation’s governors (including Bill Clinton) held a national summit on educational goals and standards, the two major political parties have inched closer to agreement on K-12 education policy. Democratic lawmakers such as the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts and Rep. George Miller of California worked closely with President George W. Bush to pass the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, which required states to regularly test students on their mastery of academic standards.

Today, it is often difficult to distinguish Republicans from Democrats on key education issues. President Obama’s signature Race to the Top program, which promotes charter schools, state tests, and tough-love accountability for educators, might just as well have been proposed by a Republican president. While Democrats and Republicans may disagree on the level of federal education funding, they continue to move toward each other on what to do with those funds. In fact, as an article in Education Week recently suggested, there is more fighting within than between the two major parties on education reform these days. ("White House Expected to Mount Fresh ESEA Effort," Jan. 19, 2011.)

While it is a difficult moment to not support greater agreement across our political parties, the reality is that this increasing bipartisanism in education reform is not working for our students. In fact, the most agreed-upon solutions—testing, privatization, deregulation, stringent accountability systems, and placement of blame on unions for all that is wrong—are doing more harm than good. Achievement overall has not improved, and the gap between the privileged and the disadvantaged has widened. Parents across the country are fed up with the stress and boredom their children feel in schools that are driven by tests and competition. Internationally, countries with better safety nets to support children’s well-being are leaving us in the dust. As President Obama noted, while the United States once led the world in education, we are now falling rapidly behind.

Despite this bad news, there appears to be no dramatic change of course on the political horizon, no healthy debate on the bipartisan agenda. Indeed, consensus on bad ideas in education has become much like a naked emperor—no one wants to break from the ranks and state a bold vision.

“The same Democrats who fight Republican efforts to privatize Social Security and Medicare have been cajoled into supporting free-market education reforms that would have made their predecessors cringe.”

This shift toward the consensual political center on education reform has signaled a more dramatic shift for the Democrats than the Republicans—and it is the Democrats who must ultimately reclaim a more progressive agenda. The current bipartisan reforms and the competitive, market-based ideology that underlies them have subverted what have traditionally been the goals of the Democratic Party: strong support for public schools and for expanding educational access and opportunities for groups historically denied both. The same Democrats who fight Republican efforts to privatize Social Security and Medicare have been cajoled into supporting free-market education reforms that would have made their predecessors cringe.

The political muddle in the partisan right-of-middle began in education with the reasonable quest to hold schools accountable for public funds—about $500 billion in federal, state, and local money in 2010. That notion, however, when combined with free-market worship, has translated into a set of policies that places enormous pressure on students and educators to perform. It has laid much blame on the doorstep of teachers’ unions and tenure systems while letting testing companies and charter school management organizations—which reap the greatest economic benefit from free-market reforms—virtually off the hook.

The problem, in other words, is not with accountability or school choice policies such as charter schools per se, but rather the free-market doctrine, which has defined conservative American politics since Ronald Reagan. This thinking about schools and children has shifted the focus away from improving how students learn and how schools are organized toward facilitating wide profit margins for large testing corporations and educational entrepreneurs. Meanwhile, the gap between the rich and the poor that continues to grow in our market-driven society is profoundly affecting all public institutions, especially our schools. The need for public policies that compensate for growing inequality has never been greater or further from the radar screen.

According to the Government Accountability Office, states now spend five and six times more on tests than they did before No Child Left Behind was enacted. The vast majority of these funds—more than 90 percent in some cases—goes to private testing companies. And because simple, multiple-choice exams are cheaper to administer and grade, states are pressured both by the testing companies and their shrinking budgets to go that route. Thus, fewer exams require students to write or tackle complex problems, limiting both the content and complexity of what our children are taught in preparation for these exams, which are increasingly high-stakes for educators and students.

Nearly 20 years ago, Democrats lost the partisan battle for policies to hold society accountable for assuring students have the “opportunity to learn” before being tested. Now, standardized tests dictate whether students will move to the next grade or graduate and may soon determine what teachers will be paid and whether they will keep their jobs. We don’t care how poor or overwhelmed the children or their teachers are. No one will touch this issue, no matter how critical it is to understanding our educational outcomes.

The charter school movement, despite its potential, also falls short of its potential because it is dominated by those who support it for its money-making possibilities. In fact, research indicates the range of charter school quality is huge—even wider than that of the regular public schools—because the sector is so deregulated and vulnerable to those who seek to profit from the per-pupil funding they receive. Even the pro-charter-school movie “Waiting for ‘Superman’” states that only one in five charter schools is “successful.” (In reality, the actual figure is slightly lower.)

So why have we put so much bipartisan hope into these schools? The “Superman” producer Leslie Chilcott admitted at a private screening of the film, which I attended, that there are many good public schools that could have been featured in the movie, but they lacked the drama that an admissions lottery holds. This is how “liberal” Hollywood filmmakers inadvertently feed a common sense that any and all charter schools are the answer for all poor students, despite mounds of evidence to the contrary.

Fortunately, a growing number of parents are fighting back against the bipartisan consensus on the role of market forces in public education. Through community organizations, including Concerned Advocates for Public Education (CAPEducation) and Parents United for Responsible Education (PURE), and the Facebook site Parents for Learning, not Testing. Parents are telling policymakers their children’s value must not be reduced to a test score or per-pupil funding allotment. Students need to spend less time racing to the top and trying to win long-shot lotteries and more time learning how to become good citizens, workers in the 21st century, and parents.

During the civil rights era, the Democratic Party stood for supporting strong public schools and expanding access to those schools for students who had been denied educational opportunities. Not coincidentally, the black-white achievement gap closed more rapidly during this era than at any time since.

Over the past 30 years, such policies have lost favor in an effort to create a more competitive, market-driven system. While these policies of yesteryear need to be revamped, revised, and adapted to the present moment, it’s time for the Democrats in Congress and President Obama to regain their moral footing and embrace the goals of a more equal society. The state of our union suggests we would all benefit from a bit of civil, partisan squabbling by progressive Democrats driven by a vision of a more just, caring, and equal public education system.'

Amy Stuart Wells is a professor of sociology and education at Teachers College, Columbia University.

Finland’s schools weren’t always so successful. In the 1960s, they were middling at best. In 1971, a government commission concluded that, poor as the nation was in natural resources, it had to modernize its economy and could only do so by first improving its schools. To that end, the government agreed to reduce class size, boost teacher pay, and require that, by 1979, all teachers complete a rigorous master’s program….

While nations around the world introduced heavy standardized testing regimes in the 1990s, the Finnish National Board of Education concluded that such tests would consume too much instructional time, cost too much to construct, proctor, and grade, and generate undue stress. The Finnish answer to standardized tests has been to give exams to small but statistically significant samples of students and to trust teachers—so much so that the National Board of Education closed its inspectorate in 1991…..

Norway is also small (4.8 million people) and nearly as homogeneous (10 percent foreign-born), but it is more akin to the United States than to Finland in its approach to education: Teachers don’t need master’s degrees; high school teachers with 15 years of experience earn only 70 percent of what fellow university graduates make; and in 2006, authorities implemented a national system of standardized testing. The need for talent in the classroom is now so great that the Norwegian government is spending $3.3 million on an ad campaign to attract people to teaching and, last year, launched its own version of Teach for America in collaboration with Statoil—called Teach First Norway—to recruit teachers of math and science.
Moreover, much as in the United States, classes in Norway are typically too large and equipment too scarce to run science labs. A science teacher at a middle school in Oslo told me that labs are unfortunately the exception, not the rule, and that she couldn’t recall doing any labs as a student a decade ago. Unsurprisingly, much as in 2000, 2003, and 2006, Norway in 2009 posted mediocre PISA scores, indicating that it is not necessarily size and homogeneity but, rather, policy choices that lead to a country’s educational success.The Finns have made clear that, in any country, no matter its size or composition, there is much wisdom to minimizing testing and instead investing in broader curricula, smaller classes, and better training, pay, and treatment of teachers. The United States should take heed.

The Children Must Play

What the United States could learn from Finland about education reform.

While observing recess outside the Kallahti Comprehensive School on the eastern edge of Helsinki on a chilly day in April 2009, I asked Principal Timo Heikkinen if students go out when it’s very cold. Heikkinen said they do. I then asked Heikkinen if they go out when it’s very, very cold. Heikkinen smiled and said, “If minus 15 [Celsius] and windy, maybe not, but otherwise, yes. The children can’t learn if they don’t play. The children must play.”
In comparison to the United States and many other industrialized nations, the Finns have implemented a radically different model of educational reform—based on a balanced curriculum and professionalization, not testing. Not only do Finnish educational authorities provide students with far more recess than their U.S. counterparts—75 minutes a day in Finnish elementary schools versus an average of 27 minutes in the U.S.—but they also mandate lots of arts and crafts, more learning by doing, rigorous standards for teacher certification, higher teacher pay, and attractive working conditions. This is a far cry from the U.S. concentration on testing in reading and math since the enactment of No Child Left Behind in 2002, which has led school districts across the country, according to a survey by the Center on Education Policy, to significantly narrow their curricula. And the Finns’ efforts are paying off: In December, the results from the 2009 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), an exam in reading, math, and science given every three years since 2000 to approximately 5,000 15-year-olds per nation around the world, revealed that, for the fourth consecutive time, Finnish students posted stellar scores. The United States, meanwhile, lagged in the middle of the pack.
In his State of the Union address, President Obama outlined his plans for reforming U.S. public education, including distributing competitive grants, raising test scores, and holding teachers accountable for student achievement. But there is much Finland can teach America’s reformers, and the rest of the world, about what outside of testing and rigid modes of management and assessment can make a nation’s schools truly excellent.

Finland’s schools weren’t always so successful. In the 1960s, they were middling at best. In 1971, a government commission concluded that, poor as the nation was in natural resources, it had to modernize its economy and could only do so by first improving its schools. To that end, the government agreed to reduce class size, boost teacher pay, and require that, by 1979, all teachers complete a rigorous master’s program.
Today, teaching is such a desirable profession that only one in ten applicants to the country’s eight master’s programs in education is accepted. In the United States, on the other hand, college graduates may become teachers without earning a master’s. What’s more, Finnish teachers earn very competitive salaries: High school teachers with 15 years of experience make 102 percent of what their fellow university graduates do. In the United States, by contrast, they earn just 65 percent.
Though, unlike U.S. education reformers, Finnish authorities haven’t outsourced school management to for-profit or non-profit organizations, implemented merit pay, or ranked teachers and schools according to test results, they’ve made excellent use of business strategies. They’ve won the war for talent by making teaching so appealing. In choosing principals, superintendents, and policymakers from inside the education world rather than looking outside it, Finnish authorities have likewise taken a page from the corporate playbook: Great organizations, as the business historian Alfred Chandler documented, cultivate talent from within. Of the many officials I interviewed at the Finnish Ministry of Education, the National Board of Education, the Education Evaluation Council, and the Helsinki Department of Education, all had been teachers for at least four years.
The Finnish approach to pedagogy is also distinct. In grades seven through nine, for instance, classes in science—the subject in which Finnish students have done especially well on PISA—are capped at 16 so students may do labs each lesson. And students in grades one through nine spend from four to eleven periods each week taking classes in art, music, cooking, carpentry, metalwork, and textiles. These classes provide natural venues for learning math and science, nurture critical cooperative skills, and implicitly cultivate respect for people who make their living working with their hands.
But perhaps most striking on the list of what makes Finland’s school system unique is that the country has deliberately rejected the prevailing standardization movement. While nations around the world introduced heavy standardized testing regimes in the 1990s, the Finnish National Board of Education concluded that such tests would consume too much instructional time, cost too much to construct, proctor, and grade, and generate undue stress. The Finnish answer to standardized tests has been to give exams to small but statistically significant samples of students and to trust teachers—so much so that the National Board of Education closed its inspectorate in 1991. Teachers in Finland design their own courses, using a national curriculum as a guide, not a blueprint, and spend about 80 percent as much time leading classesas their U.S. counterparts do, so that they have sufficient opportunity to plan lessons and collaborate with colleagues. The only point at which all Finnish students take standardized exams is as high school seniors if they wish to go to university.
Regard for students’ well-being is evident in more subtle ways, as well. Since 1985, students have not been tracked (or grouped by ability) until the tenth grade. Furthermore, since 1991, authorities have rejected the practice of holding back underachievers, concluding that the consequences of grade repetition were too stigmatizing to be effective and that students would be better off being tutored by learning specialists in areas of academic weakness.
The Finnish business community and conservative members of the country’s parliament criticized the end of tracking as a recipe for mass mediocrity—but they went silent following the publication of the 2000 PISA results. “PISA was a lucky gift for Finnish educators,” said Kari Louhivuori, the principal of the Kirkkojärvi Comprehensive School in Espoo, who began his career as a teacher in 1974. “We were under attack from traditional forces and needed outside validation of our new way.” (Some testing is thus ultimately necessary, Louhivuori conceded, if only to prove that regular testing is not.) What’s more, there is now strong proof of the economic benefits of the Finnish educational reformation, particularly in the country’s high-tech sector, which is distinguished by Nokia in telecommunications, Orion in medical diagnostics and pharmaceuticals, Polar in heart-rate monitors, Vaisala in meteorological measurement, and VTI in accelerometers. Flanking highways out of Helsinki are research centers for these companies, as well as ones for Ericsson, IBM, and SAP.

The reflexive critique of comparing the Finnish and U.S. educational systems is to say that Finland’s PISA results are consequences of the country being a much smaller, more homogeneous nation (5.3 million people, only 4 percent of whom are foreign-born). How could it possibly offer lessons to a country the size of the United States? The answer is next door. Norway is also small (4.8 million people) and nearly as homogeneous (10 percent foreign-born), but it is more akin to the United States than to Finland in its approach to education: Teachers don’t need master’s degrees; high school teachers with 15 years of experience earn only 70 percent of what fellow university graduates make; and in 2006, authorities implemented a national system of standardized testing. The need for talent in the classroom is now so great that the Norwegian government is spending $3.3 million on an ad campaign to attract people to teaching and, last year, launched its own version of Teach for America in collaboration with Statoil—called Teach First Norway—to recruit teachers of math and science.
Moreover, much as in the United States, classes in Norway are typically too large and equipment too scarce to run science labs. A science teacher at a middle school in Oslo told me that labs are unfortunately the exception, not the rule, and that she couldn’t recall doing any labs as a student a decade ago. Unsurprisingly, much as in 2000, 2003, and 2006, Norway in 2009 posted mediocre PISA scores, indicating that it is not necessarily size and homogeneity but, rather, policy choices that lead to a country’s educational success.
The Finns have made clear that, in any country, no matter its size or composition, there is much wisdom to minimizing testing and instead investing in broader curricula, smaller classes, and better training, pay, and treatment of teachers. The United States should take heed.Samuel E. Abrams is a visiting scholar at Teachers College, Columbia University, and he is writing a book on school reform.

Rally On! Blizzard Nor Snow Day Will Stop Parents, Students, Educators, and Community Members From Expressing Their Outrage Over School Closings and Charter Takeovers.

When and Where: Today, Thursday, January 27th 4:30 P.M.-6:30 P.M. at Brooklyn Bridge Park, on Centre Street, to the east of the Tweed Courthouse building.

What: On Thursday, January 27th, parents, students, and teachers across the city will join together at a city-wide rally to protest Mayor Bloomberg’s destructive education policies. The event will feature Jamaica and Queens Collegiate students performing an abridged performance of "Declassified: The Struggle for Existence [We Used to Eat Lunch Together]" which is a reinterpretation of Antigone and a candid and scathing critique of school reforms. Parents, students, and educators from schools facing closing and charter takeovers, as well as those who sponsored the event will speak.

Snow Closings, Yes! School Closings, No!

Who: Sponsored by: The Ad Hoc Committee to Stop School Closings and Charter Takeovers, Grassroots Education Movement NYC (GEM), New York Collective of Radical Educators (NYCoRE),Coalition for Public Education/Coalición por la Educación Pública (CPE-CEP), The Manhattan Local of the Green Party of NY State, Class Size Matters, United Federation of Teachers (UFT)

Demonstrators congregated on the steps of Tweed Courthouse last Friday to protest mayoral control of public schools and to lobby for hefty reforms to the city system.

Several protestors held up banners, each listing one of ten education reforms the group is asking the D.O.E. to implement immediately.

Among the proposals the protestors highlighted were equitable funding for all schools, a halt to the proliferation of charter schools; an end to school closure; and a push for smaller class sizes.

John Yanno, a teacher at John Jay High School and a member of Grassroots Education Movement NYC, bemoaned the shortage in funding for his school and the co-location of Millennium Brooklyn in the building. Seniors at John Jay have huge holes in their schedules, he said.

“They literally spend their afternoons hanging out in the bathroom or hallway, ‘cause they have nowhere to go,” said Yanno.

Muba YaroFulan, a public school parent and a member of Coalition for Public Education, accused the D.O.E. for failing its students by not offering them quality classroom education or a sufficient number of after-school programs; and for shutting parents out of the decision-making process.

“Money is being spent more towards the prison system than educating our 1.1 million students,” she told the crowd. She also mentioned Black’s controversial birth control joke from the January 13 School Overcrowding Task Force meeting held at 250 Broadway.

YaroFulan also called for an end to mayoral control, which she referred to as “dictatorship behavior.”

“We want our children to know,” YaroFulan said, “that we’ll continue to fight – and not fail to fight for them – until the end, ‘cause they deserve what’s rightfully theirs.”

P.S. 364 third grader Martha Eckl-Lindenberg read aloud a letter she and Lisa Donlan, president of the District One Community Education Council, wrote to new D.O.E. Chancellor Cathie Black to the crowd, saying, “New York City public school students, parents and teachers cordially invite you to hear our objections to the D.O.E.’s disastrous policies that are destroying our schools. Come to hear our Real Reforms that can actually improve learning in our schools!”

Eckl-Lindenberg hand-delivered the letter to Cathie Black’s office at Tweed Courthouse during the demonstration last Thursday evening.

A D.O.E. spokesperson confirmed Tuesday evening that Black is not planning on attending the rally.

Donlan was disappointed to hear the news. Overcrowding, she said, is becoming a big problem in public schools on the Lower East Side.

“We’re seeing the highest increase in kindergarten for the last two years, with no attention to change that,” she said. The students, she said, are moving up in grades without sufficient classroom space to accommodate them.

Donlan said that the D.O.E. has made no strides to promote integration in a gentrifying neighborhood such as theirs.

Girls Prep, a charter school which will move into classroom space that is currently occupied by Ross Global Academy, a failing charter school set to close this year.

Such charters, she said, are low-performing, and admit few and homeless special need students. “I don’t understand why the D.O.E. is selecting to give more resources to [Charter Prep,] a school that isn’t proving itself by accountability measures, and not serving the highest-need students.”

Leonie Haimson, executive director of Class Size Matters, said the D.O.E. is doing everything they can to undermine the health of neighborhood public schools and replace them with charter schools.

“The fact that there are several closing schools on the list which, for years, parents and teachers complained bitterly about… is directly attributable to their failed leadership,” she said. Closing schools, she added, “will just lead to more instability in their lives.”

Shortchanging NYC students

John Yanno, a teacher at John Jay High School, describes the struggle for scarce resources as the city plans for a "selective" high school in the very same building.

January 25, 2011

A GROUP of 150 teachers, students, parents and community members rallied outside the John Jay High School campus in Brooklyn before a January 11 public hearing on the New York City Department of Education's (DOE) plan to house a new "selective" college preparatory high school in the very same building.

The campus building currently houses three small schools--the Secondary School for Law (where I work), the Secondary School for Journalism and the Secondary School for Research.

Students attending school at John Jay are predominantly African American and Latino youth from impoverished Brooklyn neighborhoods, while the Park Slope neighborhood in which the school is located is affluent and predominantly white.

The decision to place yet another school, this one called Millennium Brooklyn, inside John Jay is in response to demands by the residents of the neighborhood who want a selective high school to send their children to. In other words, the school would set up a separate-and-unequal school in the John Jay campus building. This has led many to label the plan as "Apartheid Education."

Members of the Secondary School for Research's School Leadership Team blasted the New York City DOE at the public hearing, saying:

More than 60 years after the U.S. Supreme Court declared that separate was inherently unequal, and after hundreds of thousands fought against racism and for the integration of public schools, this country's public school system remains blatantly segregated--and is growing more so by the day.

The Department of Education's proposal to place the new Millennium Brooklyn in the John Jay campus reveals the racism and inequity in the New York City public schools. It also demands that we revive the inspiring struggles of past civil rights movements and take a stand against racism.

The opposition to the placement of Millennium Brooklyn is not because we don't want affluent Park Slope children to study at John Jay. In fact, our rallying cry has been "Integrate, don't segregate."

We are opposed to the placement of the new school because the NYC DOE has for years neglected the schools already in the building. For example, Millennium Brooklyn will receive about $35,000 more per year than the other three schools because new schools are guaranteed start-up money in order to purchase supplies and update classrooms.

When the three current schools in the building opened up about 10 years ago, we never received these funds. Additionally, students at the Millennium High School in Manhattan, which Millennium Brooklyn will be modeled on, receive higher per-student expenditure rates than the students in my school ($18,103 a year compared to $16,973 a year).

It's absurd that the NYC DOE is shortchanging the students who need it the most. "A lot of us don't feel that it is right that this school is coming in and getting a lot of funding when our school has been needing a lot of money, and we haven't been getting it from the Department of Education," said one student who attended the hearing.

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OTHER REQUESTS to improve the school were also ignored. Jill Bloomberg, principal of the Secondary School for Research, spoke at the hearing about how, after the NYC DOE denied her request for funding to purchase a bell system for her school, she shelled out $5,000 of her own money to purchase one.

Requests to remove metal detectors and airport-like bag scanners from

the building are another issue. The metal detectors, which students must walk through each morning, stigmatize our campus, dehumanize and criminalize our students, and make the school less appealing to prospective students, which has led to dwindling enrollment (cited by the NYC DOE as justification for placing Millennium Brooklyn in our building).

"Scanners only criminalize students," said one student at the hearing. "If you are treated like a criminal, you eventually act like one. Who would want to come to a school where children are treated like criminals?"

The metal detectors and the virtual police state seen in front of the school at dismissal send the misleading message that the kids in John Jay are criminals. "We are treated as interlopers at best, criminals at worst," said one student who described as a "racist ritual" the use of NYPD school safety agents to quickly ferry the non-white students off the Park Slope streets and into the subway at the end of the school day.

Students and teachers testified that they welcome all students, but that it was the NYC DOE's responsibility to adequately fund the three schools already in the building in order to make the schools more appealing to neighborhood families.

The building is infamous for its dilapidated condition. According to the testimony of Principal Bloomberg:

Water damage from a chronically leaky roof was so bad that some classroom walls crumbled. Door frames separated from the walls. In 2005-2006, when the roof of the building was belatedly replaced, nearly every classroom on the fourth floor was flooded. The science lab was so badly damaged that tiles floated in the water. To this day, the lab floor remains a patchwork of different-colored tiles.

Though the building received funds for wireless access throughout, most of our students' classrooms have only one electrical outlet, severely limiting the use of interactive whiteboards, LCD projectors and document readers. In our dingy student and faculty bathrooms, the plumbing is so old that the toilets fail with regularity.

Our drinking fountains function sporadically; what water we get is always lukewarm. Ancient radiators either heat rooms like blast furnaces or don't work at all. Whatever funding ever existed for classroom air conditioners never made it to our fourth floor. Of course, there's no place to plug them in if they ever do.

The John Jay community considers it a slap in the face that the NYC DOE has for years knowingly allowed our schools to exist in such a condition--only to make badly needed building-improvement funds contingent on the new school entering the building.

Cavanagh attacked the NYC DOE's statement that "capital funds be provided to [the John Jay High School campus] school building if and only if the co-location of Millennium is approved."

"That, I'm sorry, is racism," she continued. "And it's shameful."

The chants at the rally outside the school and inside the auditorium during the hearing were an expression of anger at years of neglect--of

both the building and the education of the students. The crowd chanted "Black, Latin, Asian, white, students of the world unite," "Whose school? Our school!" and "How do you spell 'racist?' D-O-E!"

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THE STRUGGLE at John Jay began last June when teachers from the schools in the building held a joint union meeting and agreed to continue to meet regularly after school on Fridays to discuss school issues.

Naming ourselves the John Jay Campus Community [3], we began reaching out to parents and held "Fight Back Friday" pickets outside the school on Friday mornings to protest budget cuts. While we never beat back the budget cuts, our early organizing made it possible to quickly organize against the most recent NYC DOE decision.

In addition to organizing teachers, students and parents from all three schools, the campus fight-back group held debates, informational pickets, began a blog, reached out to the community and held rallies in front of the school in the lead up to the public hearing. While we did not succeed in keeping Millennium out of our building (the Panel for Educational Policy voted in favor of the placement during its January 19 hearing), our organizing has helped make allies in the community and forced local politicians to take a stand.

Brad Lander, the city council member for the Park Slope neighborhood, has called on the NYC DOE to remove the metal detectors and scanners and to "provide equitable and adequate resource investments across schools by implementing long-overdue building-wide improvements, and making sure that investments tied to these changes serve all the schools equally."

Getting more funding and removing the metal detectors from the building would be important victories. They would improve the lives of the students of the John Jay Campus. Therefore, the fight for our school did not end with the panel's decision. We must continue the fight to make sure promises are fulfilled and to continue to press our demand that poor students and students of color stop being pushed to the margins.

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What you can do

Come to a rally to stop school closings on January 27, 4:30-6:30 p.m., at City Hall Plaza near the Brooklyn Bridge.

Sponsored by: The Ad Hoc Committee to Stop School Closings and Charter Takeovers, Grassroots Education Movement NYC, New York Collective of Radical Educators, Coalition for Public Education, the Manhattan Local of the Green Party of NY State, Class Size Matters and the United Federation of Teachers

(New York) Hundreds of elected officials, parents, students, educators, and community leaders came from throughout District 3 and the City last night to support District 3 schools and rally against the proposed co-location of charter schools in public school spaces. The rally, dubbed “Stop the Squeeze!” and organized by Community District Education Council 3, drew attention to the proposals to co-locate the Success Academy Charter School at the Brandeis High School building and to expand Harlem Success Academy 1 into PS149 and the Wadleigh Secondary buildings.

Eva Moskowitz’s Success Charter Network co-locations have been battling with and squeezing public school kids out of their buildings at PS149, PS241, PS123 and across the city and turning district school children into second-class citizens in their own buildings. Now she and the DOE want to continue this separate and unequal system by co-locating their new Upper West Success Elementary School at the Brandeis High School Complex, and to expand Harlem Success 1 Middle School at PS149 and into Wadleigh Secondary.

Supporters of the rally and against the Success Charter co-locations included almost every District 3 elected official including Congress Members Jerald Nadler and Charles Rangel, State Senators Tom Duane and Bill Perkins, Assembly Members Daniel O’Donnell, Linda Rosenthal and Keith Wright, and City Council Members Gale Brewer, Inez Dickens, Robert Jackson and Melissa Mark-Viverito. The rally also drew the support of the Mid-Manhattan NAACP, 25 District 3 School Leadership teams and Parent Associations, as well as the unanimous endorsement of Community District Education Council 3 (CEC3) and of Community Board 7, which voted 40-0 against the co-location of Upper West Success in Brandeis.

United States Congressman Jerrold Nadler said, “The Department of Education’s proposal to locate the Upper West Side Success Academy on the Brandeis High School campus is clearly the result of poor educational planning and a failure to listen to the community’s needs. The planned co-location will do nothing to address the pervasive overcrowding in our public schools, or to improve any schools that may be struggling. Our goal is for all parents to have the option to send their children to an excellent public school. I am proud to have supported the recent award of federal grant dollars to District 3 to build on the success of the district schools and improve the diversity and quality of schools within the district. We should continue to focus our energies on supporting the growth and improvement of our traditional district schools. Diverting space and resources from the recently-established impressive high schools on the Brandeis campus is not an answer to the needs of District 3 parents.”

“This is not about whether one supports charter schools, but about the resources that all students and schools are given to succeed," said Congressman Charles Rangel. "The city has an obligation to ensure parents and their children that this co-location will not come at the expense of the current learning environment."

State Senator Tom Duane said, "I oppose the New York City Department of Education's (DOE) proposal to co-locate a Success Academy charter elementary school at the Louis D. Brandeis High School campus. There are five wonderful high schools already co-located in this building, four of which are expected to remain there over the long-term. It is important to note that these schools deserve the opportunity to grow. I would also argue that there is still a need for another high school to serve students from the neighborhoods that previously fed into Brandeis High School, as well as those from the surrounding area. Furthermore, I believe that co-locating elementary school students with those in their late teens is problematic. DOE has scarce space and that space is best used to build on the success of our Community School District 3 schools and foster their growth and expansion. I believe that, in general, and specifically in this case, a charter school should not take precedence over promising new traditional public schools.”

State Assembly Member Linda B. Rosenthal said, “At a time when School District 3 is grappling with overcrowding at all grade levels, it is irresponsible for the Department of Education (DOE) to propose reallocating seating capacity to an elementary charter school. The DOE has shamefully denied the need for more seats, has concluded that no room for expansion exists and has warned that rezoning is the only acceptable means of addressing issues of capacity. We simply cannot afford to give up precious space to this charter school, no matter how sterling its reputation, and slight our public schools even further. The proposal to site a charter elementary school in the Brandeis High School building is inappropriate and untenable.

“As the Assembly Member representing the Upper West Side of Manhattan, it is my obligation to view this plan in the context of our community’s challenges and needs. As we continue to work toward alleviating District 3 overcrowding, the installation of an Upper West Success school at this location would be counterproductive to this goal. I am also deeply unnerved by the prospect of placing children as young as four years old alongside high school students as old as 18 or even 20. This concept displays the poor judgment involved in choosing this site and poses obvious safety concerns in a school where all who enter must pass through metal detectors.”

State Assembly Member Daniel J. O’Donnell said, “The decision by the Department of Education to co-locate The Success Academy at Brandeis High School is deeply troubling. Not only is this siting in violation of the intent and spirit of the law, as the community was not properly notified in advance, but it also raises serious concerns about allocation of resources and the availability of space for our public school children.

“If implemented, this co-location has the potential to interfere with the growth and success of the schools already thriving at the Brandeis complex. DOE is obligated to give our public school students what they so richly deserve: careful planning that accounts for a district’s ever-changing needs, ensures adequate space for all, and avoids siting decisions that have the potential to divide families over valuable resources. DOE has failed once again in this regard.”

New York City Council Member Gale A. Brewer said, “DOE, parents, and the school community successfully recreated Brandeis. The students at our new high schools are striving and growing together in their shared space. We've worked very hard for years to achieve this, including major investment, new principals and teachers, and the unique Frank McCourt High School, a real top-notch addition to our great West Side schools. An unprecedented $22 million dollars in City capital investment, and thousands of hours of work by DOE, my office, and the school and parent community has given these young adults a chance to grow minds and bodies in a renewed, diverse, and harmonious setting. It's time to let our investment in these students, and this school, grow and prosper. It is not the time to shoehorn a large elementary school into the same building with four small high schools.”

New York City Council Member Inez E. Dickens said, “Due to the potential loss of academic/cultural enrichment programs in functional public schools, Council Member Inez E. Dickens has repeatedly opposed co-relocation plans mapped by DOE in partnership with Harlem Success Academy. The Council Member feels that this co-location blueprint displaces students and denies them equitable access to science lab, computer lab and perhaps dance or art studio space. Therefore, the students become disenfranchised. The Council Member is not opposed to charter schools and works with other charter schools in her district. Unfortunately, she cannot support the Harlem Success co-location blueprint model that is now being renamed the Upper West Success Charter. This charter school model infringes upon existing functional school programs, and will be potentially exclusionary because all children cannot be accommodated under this charter school model. Therefore, Council Member Dickens supports her colleague Gale Brewer who has always been a champion of a free, quality public education for all children.

District 3 Community Education Council President Noah Gotbaum said, “These co-locations undermine the very system the DOE is charged with running by pitting students, parents and schools against each other in the name of “competition” – a competition over space and other resources that District school children invariably lose. These unwanted co-locations create separate and unequal schools within our public school buildings, and especially hurt our most vulnerable students. At Brandeis they will undermine four growing high schools and create an unsustainable environment for all of our kids. As the elected parent representatives of 17,000 kids in 32 schools across the Upper West Side and Manhattan, CEC3 calls on the DOE to reject the Brandeis, Wadleigh and 149 Success charter co-locations and instead focus on improving the schools and choices which educate all of our kids; our district schools.

Opposition to this proposed co-location has focused on several areas:

-The capacity crunch being experienced in the District 3 elementary schools will be felt in our middle and High Schools schools very quickly. The middle school and eventual high school needs are real and imminent. The proposed co-location of the Success Academy Charter Schools at Brandeis, Wadleigh and PS149 does nothing to take into account District 3‘s very own real needs and would exacerbate, not improve- as Success Charter claims - District 3 overcrowding;

- The Brandeis complex has a target capacity of ~2150. Louis Brandeis High School is being phased out. In its last full year of operation it had over 2600 students. It was, in fact, over capacity. This shows that there was and is a great need for high school seats in District 3. Any school which comes into the building should provide much-needed high school seats for the district. It should also be noted that the target capacity was calculated for a single school in which student movement was controlled by one organization and space was not shared. This figure drops when multiple schools use the same space;

-PS 149 and Wadleigh Secondary and Frederick Douglass Academy would have all plans for growth and recruitment curtailed, and programs cut as specialty art, science, culinary, and music/drama facilities would be turned back into classroom space to accommodate the charter.

-Students on the Brandeis Campus can range in age from 14 to over 21. It is inappropriate for 5 and 6 year old children to be sharing a space with high school age young adults;

-The Brandeis Campus is a high school facility and as such is unsuited to accommodating small bodies. Expensive retrofitting that would be required would waste money in a time of very tight budgets;

Tara Rinaldo, 2nd Grade Teacher at PS149 said, “HSA does not have self contained Special Ed classrooms nor do they accept students who need those services. Just because students in HSA have IEP's, that does not make them Special Ed. We take and educate ALL students. We all deserve the same quality education.”

Gay Zacerous, Speech Teacher at PS149 said, “The co-location of a charter school and a community school within same building, the community school having inferior facilities and reduced quality of services, has adverse psychological impact on our children and is 'separate' and 'unequal'. This may very well be the civil rights issue of our time.”

Toya Carter, Pre K Teacher at PS149 said, "Due to the expansion of Harlem Success my Pre K class, which is given limited use of its own playground, does not get their ample time to work on their mandated gross motor skills. I ask this question, is it right to take away from one child to ensure another child's education."

Criticism of the Success Charter model includes charges that they force or encourage learning disabled and academically at risk children to leave the school to boost the school test scores.

"My son was accepted into HSA#3 Kindergarten class in August of 2008 through lottery selection,” said parent Karen Sprowal. “After only days of attending I was asked to find another school for him due to his lack focus in class. When I refused he was suspended for disruptive behavior and lack of academic focus at the age of 5! It was truly a emotional taxing ordeal, and only after he asked me on our walk to school "is today the day HSA is going to fire me" that I transferred my son to P.S.75.”

Counter

About Me

Norm Scott worked in the NYC school system from 1967 to 2002, spending 30 of those years teaching elementary school in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn (District 14). He retired in July 2002. He has been active in education reform and in the UFT, often as a critic of union policy, since 1970, working with a variety of groups. In 1996 he began publishing Education Notes, a newsletter for teachers attending the UFT Delegate Assembly. In 2002, he expanded the paper into a 16-page tabloid, printing up to 25,000 copies distributed to teacher mailboxes through Ed Notes supporters. Education Notes started publishing a blog in Aug. 2006. Norm also writes the School Scope education column for The Wave, the Rockaway Beach community newspaper.